Supply of Machinery (Safety) (Amendment etc.) and the EU Machinery Regulation (Enforcement etc. in Northern Ireland) Regulations 2026

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, the Minister correctly points out that after almost 20 years it is time for regulations to be updated to take account of technological and other developments. Nobody has an argument with that. However, the points that have been made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, illustrate an ongoing problem. We are only at the foothills of this, because with the European reset about to take place, we are going to be confronted with a tidal wave of these SIs that will be going on for a long time.

On a number of occasions, I have argued that we have the potential to review this year our relationships with the TCA system and the European Union. We have had honeyed words from Ministers at the Dispatch Box saying, “Yes, we will do that”. I am not aware of anything currently happening. There is no meaningful attempt from government that I am aware of to seriously address what is not only a constitutional issue but rapidly becoming a serious economic issue.

The noble Baroness has illustrated, as happened in the other place, the issue of components coming into Northern Ireland to be part of a manufactured product which can then be sold on either to the EU, the world or GB. The Minister is very experienced; he knows business. He knows that to have an economy where you are constructing a product which could have hundreds of components—the form that the European Union produces, with each line with a number, down to washers, is overwhelming—the Government must take these issues seriously.

I am not going to get into the minutiae of the SI tonight because this is only an example; over the next few years, we will face literally hundreds of them. I therefore appeal to the Minister that when it is clear who is going to be representing his department at the Cabinet table—I wish it was him, but that is another matter—he asks whether the Government are going to address seriously the negotiating calamity that took place as we left the European Union, which produced the protocol, which produced the Windsor Framework. Nobody seems to be grasping this. It is costing this country an absolute fortune, with the Trader Support Service and all the differences, and the number of civil servants who have to monitor it. We are going round and round in circles, but no one is grabbing the politics or economics of it. We are just like nodding donkeys: if it comes from Brussels, that is what we do.

The Minister will have to accept that that is not good enough. I would like to see a serious negotiation. We can go back to the argument over Brexit and who was for or against it, but it was very clear to me and others like me, when we asked the Government for the plan they would introduce for Northern Ireland, that there was no plan. That is why some of us took the view that it was not the right time to make the move, but the people decided so we have to live with it and get on with it—and we must do so with enthusiasm. Whatever side of the argument we are on, a decision was taken and we have to live with it.

Therefore, instead of trying to subvert that decision, we have to try to implement it. That means that we do not do harm to our own businesses and constitutional position. I therefore ask the Minister to take back to his department the view that “Government plc” needs to reset our arrangements with the EU within the United Kingdom. We are neither fish nor flesh, and our businesses are confronted with at least two regimes; we have a patchwork quilt to try to repair the relationship. It was badly negotiated and it has been badly implemented.

I hope the Minister will take that back so that, when we come to the next one of what will be hundreds of these SIs, we might, I hope, see some light that the Government have got the message. I hope we can talk to our European partners to see whether we can find a solution, rather than having to do these things every so often.

Steel Industry (Nationalisation) Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 8th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I draw attention to a part of Amendment 16. I am delighted to see that the noble Lord, Lord Fox, has included the words

“industries that rely on the supply of steel, including the defence sector”.

That is one of the themes that is running, perhaps in the undergrowth, behind much of the thinking on the Bill. We must have a steel industry that is capable of responding, and quickly, in an emergency to the needs of the defence industry. The model has to be developed with that in hand. That is why I very much welcome the fact that that is written in the amendment.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, my Amendment 45 arises from an exchange in the other place last week with the Minister, Sir Chris Bryant. Members will be aware that Northern Ireland’s situation is different in so far as, for goods, it is covered by the Windsor Framework. Therefore, EU quotas on steel obviously apply. The issue is that we have the preposterous situation of having quotas of steel flowing from one part of the United Kingdom to the other. These two regimes are clashing.

The Minister in the other place indicated that HMRC is

“taking steps to confirm the arrangements with industry”.

Bearing in mind that this was happening with about 36 hours’ notice, it was a huge challenge for businesses and so on to get their heads around it. He went on to say:

“The Government will continue to provide guidance and support to traders moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland through the trader support service”.—[Official Report, Commons, 30/6/26; col. 764.]


That is another example of why we do not have a free internal market within the United Kingdom. Can the Minister confirm whether both these matters have taken place: has HMRC taken the steps to confirm arrangements with industry, and is the Trader Support Service providing that guidance? It was not available last week, which is why I tabled this amendment.

The other issue arising is speciality steels, because of the United Kingdom’s current limited ability to produce them and because some firms which intend to produce them are not actually doing so. I will give the Minister an example of our concerns. If a European company has a branch in our jurisdiction in Northern Ireland—for instance, Harland & Wolff—and has access under its quota arrangements to speciality steel for, say, the defence sector, which the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, mentioned and which is a particular issue in my mind, and it bids for defence work that will require a significant amount of speciality steels, those steels may not be able to be sourced within the United Kingdom. Our anxiety, therefore, is that competitiveness, price and other things could create difficulties.

I fully understand the rationale for having quotas, because there is huge surplus capacity throughout the rest of the world. We understand that that has to be managed but, given that we cannot necessarily get the steels from within the United Kingdom, can the Minister give an assurance that those steels will be available, that the quotas are adequate—whatever we say about having them in the first place—and that there is sufficient headroom to ensure that companies’ competitiveness will not be significantly damaged by the unavailability of those products within the United Kingdom?

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from my noble friend Lord Empey and will speak to the issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, in Amendment 15, which unfortunately does not cover the specific circumstances of Northern Ireland. I support Amendment 15, but my noble friend’s amendment goes further to, I hope, give protection to Northern Ireland.

The UK introduced a new steel trade measure on 1 July—

Artificial Intelligence: Impact on Employment

Lord Empey Excerpts

Monday 13th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

The noble Lord is right that AI poses challenges and opportunities to those in the labour market. The AI skills boost programme that the Government have announced is extremely ambitious in its reach. It will see a major expansion to upskill 10 million workers, which is a huge endeavour and will see the UK fit to grab the opportunities of the AI technology that is coming today.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, will the Minister tell the House what discussions she has had with our universities and colleges of further education to assess what changes they are making in the curriculum that they are offering to students and the nature of those? There is a risk with AI that a lot of junior degree activity will be removed. It is therefore also important to find out what research these institutions are undertaking to try and assess the future implications.

[Baroness Lloyd of Effra (Lab)]

We work closely with Skills England and with the DfE to understand the changes that AI is bringing and what that means in terms of the education system, what skills students need to develop and how to apply them. We are supporting the expansion of AI education in universities, for example through the TechLocal AI degree accelerator. This is a conversation that is ongoing. As the noble Lord suggests, it is something that we need to be very mindful of.

Industry and Exports (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

2nd reading & 3rd reading & Order of Commitment discharged
Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I speak as someone who served as a Trade Minister in Northern Ireland. I was also vice-president of the Institute of Export and International Trade for many years. The first committee I served on in your Lordships’ House was in about 2012. It held an inquiry into SMEs, and I listened very carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, just said. One of the interesting things was that at that time, UK Export Finance had just begun, I think, in its current iteration, away from the old Export Credits Guarantee Department, which still exists. That had only guaranteed companies in single figures, and they all tended to be the big battalions —Rolls-Royce, British Aerospace, et cetera. It has changed, and I have no issue with the perfectly sensible raising of the limits but, as the previous speaker said, it is about what you do with the raised figures.

It is supporting, allegedly, 2,700 companies in the current year. That is a tiny fraction of SMEs in the United Kingdom, which can be measured in their hundreds of thousands, and it has become increasingly challenging to get companies to export, because of the associated risks. We have only to look at our newspapers and television screens today to see some of those risks clearly and visibly exposed.

The scale at which it is helping SMEs is insufficient because it is not simply UK Export Finance putting money in its pocket and giving it to a company; it is guaranteeing it. A bank gives the money and then goes through its processes. That is where things start to unravel because the banks take their own attitude to lending, particularly to small and medium-sized companies. With a Rolls-Royce or BAE Systems, it is happy days. They are big companies with a lot of government contracts; that is easy stuff.

If we look at the need to resolve this matter, we have only to look at our balance of trade. This country has not had a balance of trade surplus since 1983. Look at the massive gap with China. I have asked on a number of occasions whether the departments will look at having a policy of providing information to companies on import substitution. It used to happen but if we are moving towards closer integration with the EU again, I guess that will be seen by them as a challenge to their way of doing things.

I agree entirely that raising the limits is perfectly sensible, but there must be a focus on getting our smaller businesses to export. There are challenges, and if simply we leave it to how the banks are going to measure these things, we will not get the breakthrough that we need. I therefore ask the Minister to take that back to his department because getting small and medium-sized businesses to get exporting into their minds, or even be open to the possibility of it, is the only way that we will fix our balance of trade. Relying on a diminishing number of large companies, which is the reality, will not be sufficient. We need the small, often family-owned companies. We know of the system with the two BMWs in the driveway—why take the risk? Why bother? But if we do not bother, we will not see those companies create the jobs for the next generation.

We are facing AI challenges and all the other things which we do not know how to measure at the moment. Will the Minister ask his department to look again at whether some kind of direction or advice can be given, not only to UK Export Finance but to our financial institutions as a whole, because that is the source of the guaranteed funding?

Employment Rights Bill

Lord Empey Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 29th April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hendy (Lab)]

My Lords, I too rise to address Amendment 1. It is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Carberry. I am not clear about the purpose of Amendment 1. It seems to me that the Government have laid out the purpose of the Bill in the Long Title. It has been given a very Long Title that sets out its ambit.

What I am clear about, however, is the need for this Bill. Last August, a report by Professor Deakin and Dr Barbakadze of Cambridge University, Falling Behind on Labour Rights, stated that

“on almost every measure of employment protection, the UK is significantly behind the average for other countries in the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD), 38 countries generally understood to be those with a high level of economic and social development globally … As they stand, labour laws in the UK are barely half as protective as those found in France and significantly below other notable European countries … This strongly suggests that there is significant scope for improvement before British labour law is even close to matching that of our nearest neighbours”.

My noble friend Lord Monks mentioned inequality in the United Kingdom in comparison with other countries. The OECD has also considered that. It currently ranks Britain as the eighth most unequal of 40 major economies in terms of income inequality. Among EU member states, only Bulgaria and Lithuania are more unequal than the United Kingdom. The European Participation Index ranks the degree of worker participation in business decision-making in different European countries. The UK is rated 26th out of 28, with lower participation than all countries except Latvia and Estonia.

There are many other metrics by which the current state of play can be judged, and the status quo is simply not acceptable. I will not mention them all, but I will mention just three. First, median pay in this country is currently just over £600 a week. Median does not mean average; it means the pay point of half the working population. In other words, half of workers earn less than just over £600 a week, although half earn more than that. Secondly, of those on universal credit, 37% are actually in work. Thirdly, we find that 6.8 million people are in insecure work; three-quarters of them—that is, some 5 million workers—are in what is described as “severely insecure” work.

The Bill does not do all that I think it should. I had the honour to serve as the legal adviser on the working party that drew up A New Deal for Working People. It is clear that there are major differences. In later debates in Committee, I will seek to move some amendments to redress some of what I consider to be the shortcomings. Overall, however, the need for the Bill is simply unarguable. We cannot go on in the way that we are at present, with workers denied a voice at work, working in insecure conditions and on extremely low pay. The Bill will go a long way to assist in putting that right.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, I hope this Bill does not turn into a Punch and Judy show between employers on one side and organisations and trade unions on the other, because it obviously has a number of meritorious proposals. However, the forensic introduction to the amendment by the noble Lord, Lord Fox, illustrates that this piece of legislation is a work in progress. I understand why the Government deem it so important, but they have to concede that a lot of it is being done on the hoof, which is undermining the Government’s position.

I had the privilege of being Employment Minister in Belfast for three and a half years, and I worked very closely with business and trade unions during that period. The last piece of legislation I did had the racy title—I am sure the Minister would be very happy to adopt it—of the Employment (No. 2) Bill. It is the sort of thing that lets the blood course through your veins. But the one area where we have failed as a country for years and years is skills. We talk about it, we have apprenticeship models, we have this, that and the other, yet we still have not solved the problem. We got rid of the old-style tecs, colleges and so on, and we have been stuck in a rut ever since.

It is obvious that there have been abuses and insecurity, and there is no point in trying to deny that; I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Monks, had to say. However, there is something that I feel a bit concerned about. We live in a world where, by and large, the major trade unions operate with large employers, whether it is the public sector or big organisations, but the bulk of the industry—the bulk of the growth in employment and everything else—comes from small businesses and micro businesses, and they do not have the capacity or the risk-taking capability in how and when they employ people.

It strikes me that there is a risk of issues creeping into what we are trying to do in this country that could have the unintended consequence of making it less likely for people to employ individuals. We have to look at the international situation. We cannot ignore what is going on. There is a revolution taking place that is having a negative effect. We also have the employer national insurance contribution. We cannot ignore that either; it is a big deal.

US Tariffs on EU Goods

Lord Empey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, it is of course disappointing that the US has imposed global trade tariffs. We are determined to support UK businesses across the sector. The Government are working with the affected businesses but, as noble Lords will know, standing up for industry means finding solutions to the global challenges we face. That means working closely and pragmatically with the US to press the case for UK business interests.

[Lord Empey (UUP)]

My Lords, the review of the trade and co-operation agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom will take place next year, 2026. If the Minister thinks that things are working smoothly, or that it is easy for businesses to operate, she is under a misapprehension. Have the Government started work on what the review should deal with? Do we have a policy? What consultation will the Government undertake as they prepare their negotiating position?

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are seeking to strengthen and reset the relationship between the EU and the UK. Taking forward our manifesto commitments on that relationship will carry tangible benefits for businesses in Northern Ireland and the UK. The Government are committed to abiding by commitments in international agreements, including working to the Windsor Framework in good faith. That will include new negotiations going forward.